What is the history of government policies on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (since 1788)?
The history of government policies on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people falls into Terra nullius From 1788, Australia was treated as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was taken over by British colonists on the premise that the land belonged to no-one (‘terra nullius’). Australia’s colonisation resulted in a drastic decline in the Aboriginal population. Estimates of how many Indigenous people lived in Australia at the time of European settlement vary from 300,000 to 1 million. Estimates of the number of Indigenous people who died in frontier conflict also vary widely.25 While the exact number of Indigenous deaths is unknown, many Indigenous men, women and children died of introduced diseases to which they had no resistance such as smallpox, influenza and measles. Many also died in random killings, punitive expeditions and organised massacres. Protection policies Indigenous survivors of frontier conflict were moved onto reserves or missions. From the end
